Card reader

I recently switched over to shooting RAW (7-9 meg a shot) instead of jpeg (2-4 meg a shot) so I got myself an 8Gig Extreme III card and this reader. I have used many readers in the past, but nothing has even come close to this speed before.

I can put over 1,000 RAW files or about 4,000 jpegs on the card and then transfer them all over to my computer in just a few minutes instead of closer to a half-hour or more. It seems to average around 1Gig a minute.

It is also pretty small so you can travel with it easily. However, if your notebook PC has a 4 pin firewire connection, like many do, this will not work. Firewire needs 6 pin or higher to be able to power devices. I e-mailed SanDisk several times about this and they just gave me the run-around, so I did the research on my own to find this out. So if anyone knows of a way around this please let me know because based on what I saw it is not possible.

Please be aware that all the people giving this product one star reviews are Windows users. If you are a Mac user with a Firewire 400 port (either laptop or desktop, does not matter) you will be very happy with it. If you are a Mac user with a Firewire 800 port, you cannot buy a faster, or more reliable card.

I am a professional fashion photographer who shoots 21 megapixel raw files. Typical number of shots per full day of shooting is two thousand to three thousand. I shoot on Sandisk Extreme IV 8GB and 16 GB cards (even Extreme III cards are too slow for the Canon IDs Mk 3), filling up 4 to 6 cards in a day. So how fast a reader downloads files to my three drives (one main, and two back-ups) is of crucial importance.

This reader is faster and more reliable than the Lexar Firewire 800 reader. I have both, but I get data corruption with the Lexar FW800 reader - four to eight images per card end up being corrupted upon download (though they are ok on the card). I... Read more

I wanted to take advantage of 1394B 800MB Firewire on my Windows XP PC so I bought a Firewire 800 card. However, I was not able to achieve the dramatic transfer speeds that others do. After researching, I found out that Microsoft CRIPPLED Firewire in Windows XP SP2! It is limited to 100MB. They provide a fix but you have to look for it by searching the Microsoft Knowledge Base MSKB for "firewire" and you will find the patch to download. You may also have to edit your registry.
Why did this happen and why has it not been fixed? Why doesn't Sandisk warn us about it? Who knows, but I hope this information helps you.